


eye of the gale

by falterth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Crossover: Uzumaki by Junji Ito, F/M, Gen, Horror Elements, Original Mythology, Sealing, Uzumaki Kushina-centric, and when i tag canon divergence i MEAN canon divergence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 18:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16372970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falterth/pseuds/falterth
Summary: It starts out small. First one of her seals collapses, sucking itself into its own center, once-complex pattern reduced to a lazily swirling spiral. The Uzukage tells her the legend of a maiden whose seals, crafted out of blood and stone, twisted out of her control and eventually consumed her and her home and sank under the sea to sleep. Her cousin tells her the story of a desperate mother who planted a gnarled tree in a dry cavern underneath the village. Kushina thinks that's it—a few failed seals, her chakra coils working a little differently than she's used to.She's wrong. It gets worse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to my first try at a longfic by myself.... whether it'll go disastrously or wonderfully is unknown. as usual i am writing by the seat of my pants so no surprise there. inspiration taken from uzumaki by junji ito. although i'm drawing my inspiration from that manga, i guarantee it won't just be a rewrite with different names. i'm trying my best to have some original stuff in here. i think i'm probably going to experiment around writing- and chapter-wise, so if things seem a little weird, that's why.
> 
> and finally: chapter length may very wildly.

“Did you feel that?” Kushina asks, furrowing her brow.

“Feel what?” Minato responds in turn, dipping his brush back into the pot of ink. “Are you sure we shouldn’t tell anyone about this?”

“No. We’ll call it a . . . pleasant surprise,” Kushina says, drawing a small barrier seal onto the edge of the bigger picture. It’s the thirtieth of its kind. She’s halfway through, thirty more to go. “It was a disturbance in my chakra. Like something was trying to twist it. It felt weird. Seriously weird.”

“Hmm.” Minato scratches at his chin, getting ink all over his face in the process. Kushina smiles. “What about that seal we made? The one on your back? Is that doing anything to you?”

Kushina shakes her head. “I don’t think so. This is about the third time it’s happened. And you have the same seal. Shouldn’t it affect you too?”

“I don’t have your sensitivity to chakra,” Minato says, “so it could be doing something to me and I’d be none the wiser. Maybe it’s not draining our chakra effectively. It could be that the seal can’t properly accommodate your dense chakra, so it’s returning it to you but something got messed up in the process.”

Those are all valid theories but Kushina doesn’t think they’re it. She can’t say why. It’s a gut feeling. Minato has always been a little more clinical than her, a little colder and a little more analytical, but Kushina is a woman who listens to her instincts. Some say it’s because she’s not too far removed from a beast. Kushina takes it as a compliment.

“Well, I checked our wards. They’re working fine,” she says. “Normal amounts of chakra and everything. But you can take a look if it’ll make you feel better, yeah?” Minato nods and moves, tiptoeing around the seal until he’s crouching behind Kushina. His hand hovers hesitantly on the zipper of her shirt and she huffs. “Just do it. We don’t have all day.”

Minato unzips the back of her shirt, brushing her hair out of the way so it doesn’t snag. Kushina feels his hands trace over the seal they use to power the wards at home. Whenever they’re on the island, the seals drain their chakra—almost imperceptibly for Kushina and her massive stores, but for Minato it’s noticeable. Not enough to handicap him in a fight but enough to be a minor distraction. The seals store chakra and release it in the form of nigh-impenetrable barriers surrounding Kushina’s house, her predecessor’s house. The barriers also function as a chakra well that Kushina and Minato can draw from to boost their own chakra. She thinks Mito would have been proud of these seals.

“Um, Kushina?” Minato asks in that tone of his, the one that almost certainly means _I don’t like what I’m looking at._

“What’s wrong with them?” Kushina asks. Best to get it out of the way.

“It’s warped. The seal,” Minato explains. “I can’t—the inner circle is all wrong. It’s like it’s collapsing in on itself.”

“Well, that can’t be good.” Understatement of the year, probably. But if the wards are doing fine . . . “Minato, how’re your chakra levels?”

“Normal,” Minato answers quickly. “Should it be draining more of mine?”

“I’m not sure. Copy the seal on a piece of paper. I wanna take a look at it.”

She feels movement at her back and the sound of rustling papers meets her ears. “It should be pretty quick,” Minato says. His voice is muffled like he’s got a brush in his mouth—which, considering he’s Minato, wouldn’t be very weird to assume—and soon enough he’s shoving the paper into her hands.

It looks normal, on the outside. The inner ring is twisted out of shape, though, like the center is slowly sucking the components of the seal toward itself in a large lazy spiral. Kushina frowns. “Did we regulate the chakra like this? Is it supposed to travel in this pattern?”

It’s not. Kushina knows it’s not but she needs to make sure.

“It isn’t,” Minato says, confirming her thoughts. “We need to get this seal off you after we’re done setting this up. I don’t know what went wrong. I’d have to experiment with—”

“You mean _we’d_ have to experiment with it,” Kushina says sternly, reaching behind her to zip her shirt back up. “You don’t have to do everything by yourself, you know. Now that I’m finished with that whole Konoha mess, I’m not gonna be as busy. It’s just us again, taking on the world, right?”

Minato laughs. “Maybe so. Hey, Kushina?” he asks, voice uncharacteristically serious.

Kushina turns around to face him. “What? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s just . . . I bet I can finish my part of the seal before you do,” he says, and just because he’s difficult, he throws a handful of paper scraps at her face and scrambles off to his side of the seal.

“Hey!” Kushina protests, shaking her head to clear her vision. “At least I only have thirty left to go! You’ve got forty! Argh—you’re on, assface.”

Rule one of sealing: don’t rush seals. It’s good for Kushina and Minato that they’ve reached a level of expertise where they can practically tear through the various symbols and circles. Kushina manages to draw one of the intricate border seals in five minutes, an all-time record for her. After every few brush strokes, she sends a furtive glance Minato’s way. He seems to be making the same progress as her. Their eyes meet from across the room and Kushina ducks her head. She won’t blush. Okay, maybe she will. But that’s strictly classified.

She’s done in just over an hour and twenty minutes. When she looks up to check Minato’s progress she finds him putting the finishing touches on his last seal. Hmph. He just had easier ones to do than her.

“I win!” she cries triumphantly, pointing at him.

Minato looks up at her with a sour expression on his face. “Fine. Next time it won’t be so easy, though. You just got lucky because I had more seals than you.”

Kushina heaves a sigh. “If it makes your ego feel better.” Minato moves to get up, no doubt to go over there and attempt to paint a silencing seal onto her skin, but she narrows her eyes at him and he backs off.

“So,” he says, working up the nerve to sidle up to her. “Maybe we should clean up and get out of here. I think the Sandaime’s going to be back soon and I would rather not see her when this all happens.”

“Are you _kidding_ me?” Kushina asks incredulously. She spreads her arms wide, gesturing to the Administration Hall around them. “This is going to be glorious! I wouldn’t miss it for the world! We’re going to cause so much chaos. Sweet, beautiful chaos.”

Minato shakes his head. “Only you, Kushina.”

“That’s right!” Kushina crows, pumping a fist into the air. “The Red Hot Habanero of Uzushio! The only one of my kind!”

“Well, let’s at least clean up this mess before everything starts. We don’t have to leave but I can’t imagine the Sandaime walking into a messy hall would earn us any points. And we can still use some of these preliminary seals.” Minato pokes at one of the papers with his toe, as though it’s going to eat him. It might. That’s Kushina’s prototype carnivorous seal. It hadn’t worked, unfortunately, but she’s going to make it work. “You handle the seals. I’ll handle everything else. Then we'll activate it and watch from a distance. A  _safe_ distance, preferably.”

“This’ll teach ‘em to let us guard the hall during empty hours,” Kushina says confidently. “Oh, man, the look on Kazue’s face when she walks in here . . . ”

Minato smiles indulgently and starts picking up the ink pots scattered across the room. “You know, I think I’d look good with a mustache. Don’t you? Hey, I think you’d be pretty hot with a beard.”

Kushina shudders. “No. No! You would look so bad. I would look so bad. I’d have to dump you out of shame. We would be horrible.”

Minato clutches at his chest. He’s already on the floor so he can’t drop to his knees, but he does manage to execute a convincing flop. “Anything but that, Kushina. I’d die without you.”

“Oh, cut the melodramatics,” she grumbles, ducking her face and collecting her prototype carnivorous seal off the ground. Just as a safety measure, she’s careful not to let any of her chakra escape lest she activate it and find that it suddenly does work. She plucks a few other seals off the ground, ones she’d absentmindedly scribbled when she was bored. And, of course, there are the rough drafts to contend with. Kushina rolls up the canvases tightly, pausing to stare longingly at the one meant to turn hair green. She had put blood, sweat, and tears into that thing . . . but their new idea is better. Undoubtedly so. “I’m done here.”

Minato nods to her. “Just let me seal these up.” He pulls a small scroll out of the pouch strapped to his thigh and seals their supplies into it, waving a hand to clear away the chakra smoke. He frowns. “I always overcharge those things.”

“I’m not sure if it’s possible to not do that,” Kushina says contemplatively. “Even I overcharge them. Hmm . . . wonder if there’s a seal for that.”

Minato shrugs. “We could make one.”

“It’d have to be a pretty small seal,” Kushina theorizes. “Maybe enough to fit on the back of your hand. And we’d have to do a lot of trial and error . . . and we’d have to adjust depending on the type of scroll. There’s a reason seals for chakra control are so finicky. You’d have to write every single jutsu you could possibly use into the seal and even then there are times when you want to use more or less chakra.”

“It doesn’t have to be just one seal. We could make a sleeve of seals or something, ink them onto someone’s arm. But that kind of takes away space for other more useful seals,” Minato says. “Chakra control can be improved with meticulous practice. Why would I waste arm space on what basically amounts to a cheat?”

“You’re right, Minato,” Kushina says. “This was useless. Moving on—”

The door opens. Minato and Kushina turn as one toward it.

“I see you’ve kept the hall . . . relatively untouched,” Uzumaki Kazue comments dryly. She’s a severe-looking woman. Her crimson hair falls just past her shoulders. She’s forgone the Uzukage’s robes as usual—she wears the standard jōnin uniform like everyone else. It’s a good look on her, though, Kushina notes.

“Sandaime-sama,” Kushina says gravely, taking a few steps to the side so she’s standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Minato. “We have guarded the hall and made sure no intruders trespassed upon these lands. Now we give it over to you.”

They bow in unison. Minato’s shaking with laughter. Kushina stomps on his foot and he almost loses it.

Wait—there it is again—that strange twinge in her chakra like something’s taking it and twisting. It’s small. Kushina might not have noticed it if her sensitivity to chakra was any less than it is now. But she does, only because she’s one of the best at it around. It happens again, and again, pulling harder and harder with every go-around. Her chakra feels as though it’s being tossed through a blender, around and around, winding down to a single point. She tries to follow the thread. Something out there is eating her chakra and she needs to know what it is, but it feels like she’ll be sucked in if she takes another step toward it. She can’t do it. Can she? Will she?

“Kushina?” she hears from far away, a voice on the other end of the shore. “Are you okay?”

She moves her lips but she doesn’t think she’s talking. Her vocal cords hum. There’s a hand on her back. Did she fall? She thinks she did. Her vision’s a starburst of black and green. Nothing’s wrong.

Something is very, very wrong.

The pull on her chakra lightens. The tide recedes. Kushina takes a deep breath and another one, and another and another until her head feels light. Maybe it’s the seal on her back. Maybe if she turned over and pulled down her zipper she’d see the seal twisted out of shape, unrecognizable. She’s got so many seals on her body. Maybe every one of them is like that.

Kushina takes one more deep breath, savoring the air, and then her vision comes back. The ceiling of the Administration Hall looms long and low above her.

“Minato, unzip my shirt,” she orders hastily. He nods frantically down at her. She’s already on the floor—wooden floor beneath her back—and all Minato has to do is roll her over. “Check the seal and any others on my back.”

Kushina’s only suffered from chakra exhaustion once and she knows what it feels like. This is worse than chakra exhaustion. Her chakra’s there but it feels wrong. It’s twisted, gnarled, tangled, ends forming little whirlpools. She tries to grab hold of it and it vanishes. If the seal failed and is warping her chakra she needs it off _now._

“What’s going on?” Kazue demands. To her right, Kushina hears footsteps. To her left, she hears Minato’s worried breathing. “Is there something wrong with your ward seal? Namikaze, let me see.”

“Yes, Uzukage-sama,” Minato says. He doesn’t look like he wants to go but he gives Kazue space anyway. “It’s . . . the last time I checked, it was—the inner ring, the one meant to drain her chakra, was deformed. It’d started to collapse—maybe her chakra wasn’t compatible, although I’m not sure why—”

“Calm down, Namikaze,” Kazue says. Her tone is one Kushina recognizes as her no-nonsense voice. “Nothing’s going to get done if you’re panicking. Let me see . . . it’s the whole thing now. You said it was only the inner ring? The outer ring merged with it. Looks like a whirlpool pattern seal. Difficult to create on purpose, and you say it’s done this on its own? I’ve heard of this phenomenon, but—I didn’t think it was real.”

“What?” Kushina asks. “Hey! Tell me what’s going on! It’s my seal. I have a right—”

“Patience, girl!” Kazue scolds, taking off her hat and whacking Kushina with it. “But I'll tell you. It’s an old legend passed down in my branch of the family . . . ”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my sister likes this fic so i guess i can’t just abandon it and never post again....klsjalkjdf

“It starts before Uzushio was a village,” Kazue begins, “and it ends around that time too . . . ”

*

Maybe it’s the oppressive air around the village that makes her want to leave, or maybe it’s the way the sun sparks off the sea at sunset, or maybe it’s the gulls that hang around looking for dead fish to eat—she’s always loved gulls. Either way, Sukoru plans to build her home on top of a small but sturdy rock rising out of the ocean. It will be made of stone slabs fused together with seals and her wards will be built into every single piece of the house.

“Blood-seals anger old gods, Sukoru,” her father tells her when she proposes the idea to him.

“Gods?” she says, trying not to let her disbelief show. Blood is the strongest ink, connected to the life force of the person from whence it came, infused in chakra. People tell her blood-seals are twisted, wrong, and they open a gate to places better left alone. The spiral is a strong, sturdy shape, almost made to be inked with blood. Sukoru finds no shame in her sealing. Other people do but she is proud. “I will answer to them if it comes to that.”

“Your pride will break you someday,” her father says.

It’s always like this. She says something and _snap_ —he snubs her. She’s not worth his time or his energy.

“I just need some of your ink,” she says.

“Very well. You may have two pots of ink for your . . . hobby,” her father says after a long pause, waving his hand dismissively. A hobby? Her life’s work reduced to mere fun and games?

“My seals,” she says quietly, bitterly, “will revolutionize the practice. Maybe you don’t think I’m telling the truth. Maybe your gods warned you because they didn’t want you to be powerful. You believe it’s good to stick to the old traditions. I’m going to prove you wrong. But . . . thank you.”

Her father’s face relaxes. “You’re welcome,” he says softly. “I hope that harm does not befall you.”

She nods and pulls the door open. Sukoru wants to slam it behind her but she doesn’t because she needs to show she’s in control of her actions and emotions.

Later that night she heads out to the little island on which she will build her home. Heavy slabs of stone lay stacked one on top of the other. The highest pile comes up to her shoulders. It won’t be easy to ink out all these seals. She’ll do it anyway. Sukoru unloads the ink pots from her boat and heaves them up the crumbling stone slopes of the island. She stops briefly to catch her breath. After her arms have regained their strength she drags the inkpots toward her working site, a little dip in the earth she’d dug herself.

She half an hour carefully mixing ink with blood from a steadily-dripping cut on her forearm. It’s dark, so she lights a torch and hooks it onto one of her stands. Sukoru studies the pool of ink with a critical eye. It’ll have to do. She can feel wisps of chakra coming up from it like steam. Or that could be the warmth her blood is giving off.

Sukoru ties her hair up into a ponytail and pulls the nearest stone slab toward her. She’ll be lucky to finish within three days.

It’s easy to fall into a monotonous rhythm. Dip, swirl, paint. Her brushes are laid out on the ground before her, fine-haired and coarse-haired and shapes and sizes of all kinds. The smaller ones are for fine work: the finishing touches, error corrections. Paint, paint, paint. The seals are simple—the hard part is intent. Sukoru has a strong will. It won’t be too much of a challenge for her.

*

They are finished three days later. She’s surrounded by stone on every side—she’d marked the slabs with seals and they had jumped into place, eager to please her. She hasn’t activated them yet but already they sing with her chakra, threading through the air like the sea breeze. Her blood is on this stone. She’d used a base of coal ink and written tiny characters in her own blood to strengthen the foundation.

These walls are made of nothing but her chakra. She’s proud. Of course she’s proud . . . but at night when she finally finishes everything and the last roof slab fuses with all the other ones and she lies on her side to rest a fear comes creeping over her. The seals have blended in with the rock, invisible to the eye but still there, a sort of pressure on Sukoru’s sensitive chakra system. They’re invisible but her eyes find themselves straying ceaselessly toward the center of where she knows each stone slab to be.

She’d ringed the island in looping, swirling seals. She’d traced a curving path all the way to the center where she sleeps now. The spiral is the strongest shape in sealing and blood and coal are the strongest inks. Her father says blood-seals anger old gods.

Sukoru’s mind is fuzzy. A thick layer of cloth covers her senses. It might be the blood loss. She checks the bandage on her arm to make sure the wound hasn’t reopened. It’s funny. She hadn’t brought any rations to the island but she doesn’t remember leaving to get food or water. She’s hungry but she doesn’t feel the urge to eat. She’s thirsty and her throat and lips are cracked but the longer she lies there in the center of a seal made of blood and stone and coal the less she feels the pain.

Her mind had been so clear, but her father says she’s angered old gods.

*

“Sukoru, come out of there,” her father pleads. She can’t see him but she knows he’s standing in a rowboat tied to one of the standing rocks on her little island. 

“You know my protections are forfeit if I come out while the seals are taking,” she says weakly. She’s lying in a pool of blood. “I’m sorry.”

“If you’re sorry, just come out! We can find another way to put up some barrier seals. I told you making blood-seals would do nothing good for you.” Her father sounds anxious, begging, scared.

The last time she’d talked to him he’d been angry. Now she’s lying in a puddle of her own blood. If she survives this she’ll be stronger for it. She didn’t put enough of her blood into the seals and now the seals are taking it from her. Maybe they have a little of her attitude. Maybe they’ll let her live because they recognize her chakra. But maybe she’s just crazy for thinking her seals are sentient at all. A seal is a chain that belongs to its wielder.

Harm or cage. They’re all the same to her.

“I know what I’m doing,” Sukoru whispers. “I can’t back down.”

She could. Sukoru could walk away from all this, forget blood-seals, forget everything she’s worked toward. But she won’t. She can’t. This is her life’s work. She’s sorry for making her father worry but she’ll never be sorry for her seals.

*

Her blood has dried and soaked into the stone. Blood is the strongest ink, the life force given physical form. A seagull flies over her home and drops dead in front of it. Its body falls in a lazy spiral toward the ground. She doesn’t come out of her home. She doesn’t need to, hardly, when she’s wrapped tight and warm on the center of her island.

Anger?

Something is protecting her here. Something old, beyond her understanding.

“Protecting,” her father had said yesterday. “You really think that’s what it is? It’s waiting for something. And when whatever it’s waiting for happens, it will kill you.”

Sukoru closes her eyes sleepily. A star shines above her in the sky. She built the house out of blood and stone. It wouldn’t harm her.

*

Time passes without her telling it to. The sun tracks a spiral overhead. She lies in the center of the island. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out.

Nobody sees her or the island again.

*

“And . . . that’s supposed to be a warning,” Kushina says dubiously. She’d been in for an exciting tale, damnit, not a maiden who’d got what was coming for her. What’s the fun in that? And anyway— “That’s it? She didn’t, like, come back to haunt people or anything? And it’s a phenomenon now, is it? What, are you trying to scare me away from sealing?”

Kazue’s face is red, with anger or maybe embarrassment. She is not looking very stately right now, although terrifying? Definitely. “I _told_ you it’s a legend. Only place I’ve heard it, though.”

Kushina rolls her eyes. “Okay. Storytime’s over. Minato, zip me up, will you?”

Kazue is standing very, _very_ near the seal Kushina and Minato had been drawing. 

“Of course.” Minato zips her shirt up and murmurs, “you know she’s . . . well . . . if she breathes a little deeper she’s going to cross the activation line.”

“Yes,” Kushina says quietly. Kazue is talking to one of her jōnin about something-or-other. “Make a break for it?”

“Yeah,” Minato says. “Hey, Uzukage-sama? Can you just take a step to your left?”

Kazue narrows her eyes. “Is this another one of your schemes? Will I turn invisible for three days like I did last time?”

“No, no,” Minato laughs. “But you’ll never know if you don’t do it!”

They make their grand getaway. The swearing of the Uzukage is sweet background music to the whole adventure.

*

“You know what?” Minato asks that evening when they’re hunched over their sealing texts and designing seals for performing specific jutsu even though they said it was a waste of their time to think about it. “I think we actually got off kind of light.”

“D-ranks aren’t so bad,” Kushina agrees.

“That legend gave me the creeps though,” Minato admits. “Pass me a fine work brush, please.”

“I dunno,” Kushina says, handing him the whole jar of brushes—which, okay, thanks, but Minato has his hands full and can’t really sort through everything. “It seemed kind of . . . weird. Like she was alive and there were a lot of things going on that I don’t really understand, and then she was just dead.”

“Happens all the time in real life,” Minato says uncomfortably. There’s something about Sukoru that offsets him. She reminds Minato of Kushina, a little, except Kushina doesn’t have that weird obsession with blood and generally seems a little less, well, unhinged than Sukoru. But it’s odd.

She’s not even real.

“But _why?_ Why was she so obsessed with blood? Was she a vampire? Did she have some freaky kinks? Sure, I guess you can use it for sealing . . . hey, blood has chakra in it, right?” Kushina asks, rapid-fire.

Minato blinks, orients himself, before asking, “Yes, but you’re not thinking of actually making any seals with it, are you?”

Kushina scoffs. “No. I don’t want to die of blood loss, thanks, or be caught right after I’ve been putting the stuff into a seal. Is it even legal?”

“We have law books in the—”

“Ahahah, you know, I could really go for some . . . getting back to the task at hand! Doesn’t that sound great?” Kushina asks, smiling at him in a painfully fake way but damn it all, she knows Minato can’t resist her.

He sighs.

“How can we allow for adjusting the amount of chakra needed to perform the jutsu?” he asks, giving her something to latch onto. “And do you think, if someone had a seal for a jutsu too powerful for them to handle, the seal would attempt to pull chakra out of them?”

“For starters, they’d be regulated,” Kushina sniffs. “As if I’d let our fine work go to just anyone.”

“Careful, you’re starting to sound like a certain snooty Hyūga,” Minato teases.

“Oh, him? He’s got nothing on me,” Kushina boasts. “But, okay, let’s think of the seal as a bottle. And your chakra is a fountain, or something. The opening is on the bottom of the bottle. If you put chakra into it, the bottle will fill up. If you put too much into it, what comes out of the other end will be a little more forceful, but as bad as if you just blew hot water everywhere. If you put too little into it, nothing happens. The water drains away. The bottle can’t just magically suck water into it though. Am I getting to into this metaphor?”

“No, that was helpful. So, open? For draining away?” Minato suggests, scrawling the basic character for “open” onto a piece of paper. “That might not allow the bottle to fill, though. Gate?”

“That’d be a little tricky to pull off. You’d need to somehow prevent the seal from becoming a run-of-the-mill storage seal,” Kushina says, frowning.

“Chakra storage seal?” Minato asks. “Like the Byakugō?”

“No, that uses ‘carrier,’” Kushina says. “Come here, let me show you my idea . . . ”

*

“I just remembered,” Kushina says faintly, hands working through the motions of gutting her third fish. They’re serving their grounded-to-D-ranks punishment one grueling chore at a time. This one is a mission to help an old man make dinner for a family reunion. Boisterous children are constantly getting underfoot, trying to get a look at Uzushio’s Yellow Flash and the Red Hot Habanero. “The seal. We forgot it.”

Minato looks around to see if there are any children, and upon finding none, curses spectacularly. Kushina is reluctantly impressed. “How did we forget that?” he says quietly, leaning in. She shuffles a little closer to him. Hopefully this’ll give any prying kids a hint.

“I dunno, it doesn’t feel weird or anything,” Kushina says.

“Then we have to remove it as soon as we get home. I’ll make a mental note. _You_ make a mental note,” Minato says. “Mental alarm seal . . . ”

“Please, for the love of god, _please_ do not put any new projects on our plate,” Kushina says tiredly. “And I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but seals aren’t the answer to everything.”

Minato clutches his heart and mimes falling to his knees. Does he know he’s got fish guts on the front of his vest now? Kushina snorts.

“You wound me, fair lady,” Minato says. Somehow, even though he looks like he’s about to lose his balance, and there’s fish guts and the whole kitchen smells like raw fish, oh god, he _still_ manages to look good.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kushina grumbles, turning away. Here’s a secret: they didn’t call her the Red Hot Habanero because of her hair alone. When Kushina blushes, she glows. And it’s awful. “Get back to work, you big lump.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm living it up in [gama-chan party,](https://discord.gg/g25p3S3) discord server run by yours truly.


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